1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic mail. In particular, the present invention relates to electronic mail systems that are designed to mitigate address book weaknesses that permit the sending of e-mail to wrong addresses.
2. Description of the Related Art
Since its introduction to the public in the late 20th century, e-mail has become a popular and widely used form of communication both at home and in the workplace. It is commonly used in research and engineering circles to share technical information, as well as by business people that use it, e.g., to negotiate, to enter into business transactions, etc. Additional professionals such as physicians, attorneys, and accountants also use it to communicate with their patients or clients.
Misdirecting, misrouting, or misaddressing sensitive e-mail messages such as business negotiations, correspondence with patient, etc., poses some risks to the sender of such messages, whether it is a private entity or an organization. For example, leakage of confidential information of an organization due to an e-mail message that was misaddressed to an unauthorized recipient may have dreadful consequences to the organization. Exposure of the future strategic plans of the organization to an unauthorized recipient, or permanent loss of trade secrets or other intellectual property rights are two examples of possible risks.
As a result, a large number of corporate and governmental organizations have implemented e-mail use policies for their employees, and many of these organizations have also set up some type of employee e-mail monitoring procedures or systems. But because of the amount of effort required, such procedures typically fall short of a detailed review of all messages sent by employees. Instead, an employee's e-mail is often only carefully evaluated once there is some indication that his or her communications present a risk or have already created a problem.
Systems have also been proposed that detect individual words or phrases without human intervention. But while these systems may be able to detect crude language usage or other potentially undesirable keyword patterns, language that is harassing or insulting, or that breaches an organization's confidentiality or creates other business risks, can be quite subtle.
Moreover, both human and automated pattern monitoring can be completely ineffective when applied to individual messages. This is because any particular message may only be viewed as objectionable or otherwise problematic in view of the context of other communications. And these other communications are often not available to the software, or even a human reviewer.
Furthermore, many e-mail utility applications support automatic completion of e-mail addresses that were previously used or of recipients that are listed in the address book coupled to these applications. User experience tests show that as a result of this function e-mail messages are sometime misaddressed and sent by mistake to the wrong recipients. Automatic systems or procedures typically do not detect such mistakes. Therefore, the use of e-mail by individuals or by employees of an organization can still pose a substantial risk.
In addition, the pervasive use of address books in e-mail (for address automatic completion) can lead to undesired cases where certain pieces of e-mails are sent to a valid recipient address, alas the wrong address, because of typographical errors and “quick-finger” mistakes.
Another pervasive problem exists in which an address is indeed a valid one and also belongs to person or group with whom the sender has an on-going communication, be it through e-mail or IM, etc. However, certain pieces of e-mail should not be sent to those specific addresses and were not meant to be listed by the sender. Nevertheless, through a simple typographical error, certain e-mail is sent to a recipient that should have not received it.
Yet another case arises when the recipient is an acquaintance, however, through a history of the sender's actions, the other recipients of a particular e-mail piece were never on a common mailing list with him and/or were not sharing an e-mail with a subject matter of the present e-mail domain.
When the e-mail is a confidential one, these sorts of mistakes can have disastrous consequences. Therefore, in order to prevent this from occurring, regulatory policies are often put in place to specifically control how the user is utilizing e-mail functionality. Examples of this require users to enter full addresses for any document recipient of a certain importance or of a certain confidential level. Alternately, the system permits access only to address books which are designated such that the address lists in them are permitted to be exposed to the respective type of information. However, this approach is very restrictive for the user.